


Go Lift Yourselves Up (to sound the bells)

by Abbie



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Partnership, season 1/season 2 bridge, the missing five months
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:46:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abbie/pseuds/Abbie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Glades fall, for five long months, all Felicity and Diggle really have are each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Lift Yourselves Up (to sound the bells)

**Author's Note:**

> I have desperately wanted to see the five months where Oliver was fucking off on Lian Yu and Felicity and Digg had to deal with everything in his absence since the season began. This is one possibility of how things may have gone.

After the Glades fall, after the unit of trust and reliance and secret keeping they have formed falls apart with goodbye payoffs and plane tickets out of the country, after Tommy is buried and the rubble-buried broken unearthed, Felicity and Diggle find they are all each other has.

They could drift their separate ways, this unspeakable, incredible time between and behind them fading into silence and flinched-from memory, but instead they draw together, close ranks.

Oliver abandons them—and everyone else who needs him—but they do not, will not, cannot abandon each other.

It’s down to Diggle, really.

He has family. AJ, who needs him. Carly, who is trying to love him, to let him love her.

He could take his family and his chance at a quieter future and slip away from all of this.

(If he could let Floyd Lawton slip away, let his brother’s death mean nothing. But how can he look at his nephew, fatherless, at Carly, widowed, and not need to know? Need to strike back? He wouldn’t have this chance without Andy dead. Shouldn’t have this chance. How can he take that and turn his back on Andy’s memory, on the brother that shouldn’t have been buried?

Why is it always John who lives?

How could he turn his back on Andy… or Felicity? She’s not his blood. She isn’t dead. But she fought beside him through battles. This is a war, and she enlisted. He cannot walk away when his shoulder should be firmed up against hers. Stand together, fall together.

Oliver doesn’t understand there is no option to fall apart. But John does.)

Felicity, from what Digg can see, has no one. He’s wondered who she makes her excuses to, who her lies build lines between, but he’s beginning to realize she lies to no one, excuses herself to no one.

She has no one to fall back to.

That’s wrong. She has him.

She would have let him walk away, he knows. There is a turning point when he wakes up to find his bank account ballooned, and an hour later Felicity is at his door, confused and furious and bringing news—Oliver has left the country. Has left them behind.

John is tired and grim and wishes he was surprised, but he lets her rant, lets her vent her anger and hurt and disappointment. He quietly wonders how she saw so much in Oliver from the start, and wonders if he was a fool to think the kid had what Felicity saw there for a handful of moments. Because Oliver is AWOL, breaking down alone when he is still needed. It’s not a reaction that makes sense to John, but it’s one he’s seen again and again. He can’t really fault the kid, but he can’t condone his choices, either.

You don’t leave your people behind.

But Diggle is a soldier, and for all Oliver was remade in war, he has none of the discipline or rules ingrained in him that give the fight structure for John.

So he lets Felicity’s words wash through him in silence. When she runs out, he doesn’t have much to say. (It’s the wrong thing to say, he realizes later.)

She gets quiet, apologizes for taking up his time, and leaves.

John regrets, later, the hours it took him to go after her. The hours it took him to realize she was retreating, giving him an out to drop her, same as Oliver. To cut her loose to fend for herself after they brought her into the nightmare and failed spectacularly to protect her.

(She didn’t really need protecting. She needed equipping, and support. They were giving her the wrong tools, treating her as an asset when she should have been a partner. John will defend himself—to himself—later by saying he never expected a soldier out of this tiny, bright, stubborn woman.)

Felicity doesn’t hide the relief when John shows up at her door late that night. The circles under her eyes and the way she so easily cries against him tells him she hasn’t been sleeping. Tells him he made the right choice.

From then on, they are a solid, two-person unit. They lean on each other, draw strength—he never could’ve known how much strength _he_ would find in _her_ , unhardened by battle and only newly tested by failure and loss—but she might carry guilt, might wake with screaming nightmares and cry herself awake from sorrow, but she is spitting mad and stubborn as hell and ready to give up on nothing and no one. It makes him feel like he’s got purpose, again.

It also scares the shit out of him when he realizes she wants to carry on without Oliver.

He didn’t think she’d sit back and feel sorry for the people of the Glades and do nothing, but what he expected was monitoring news reports and CCTV footage. Anonymous tips to the police (who she later tells him have taken to ignoring most of them if they don’t look good in the press.)

The first time she calls him after interrupting a mugging in the middle of the night, and asks him to bring his suture kit, he realizes she isn’t fucking around.

He never wants to stitch that girl up again (she grits her teeth and swills some whiskey and tells _him_ to suck it up even as she blinks back tears) but he’s pretty sure she’s not done throwing herself into danger.

He doesn’t try to tell her no. Doesn’t try to put his foot down or make demands or extract unfair promises. He’s her partner, not her father. And he’s never been particularly fond of arguing with brick walls.

So instead he makes her come to his place and help push all of the furniture against the walls so he can unroll the beaten practice mat he rescued from the unstable foundry. (They made a few forays, to clean up the most incriminating and obvious evidence. He’s caught Felicity looking into contractors with reputations for discretion and just bites his tongue. It’s not like she doesn’t have the money now.)

Their lessons are good for them both. They make her less a combat liability, and him slightly less worried when she insists on getting involved in trouble. It has the bonus side effect of calming her down enough to rethink rushing headfirst into danger. She starts looking for better, smarter ways.

They spend a great deal of time together. When they get to the point of exchanging keys, it doesn’t even seem weird, just convenient. (He’s incredibly grateful Carly never looks at him sideways for this closeness he has with a white girl ten years his junior. He doesn’t understand how Carly rationalizes his relationship with Felicity; he’s just relieved it somehow makes sense to her that they’re friends. Because he and Felicity _are_ friends, and he and Carly are having enough come between them without adding that into the mix.)

John is looking for Lawton again. His need to take Deadshot down once and for all has only been steadily growing, crystallizing.

Felicity helps.

She helps, too, when his hunt for Lawton becomes the last straw in his relationship with Carly. Helps him while AJ is upset with him for weeks. Helps while Carly needs space to find a new, more distant equilibrium with John.

If he’s honest, Felicity keeps his head together through it. She’s equal parts sympathy, kindness, sarcasm, and hard truths, and it helps him sort the anger, the loss, the sense of failure to find peace with the breakup. To know it was the right choice for everyone involved, when his priorities had to be what they were.

He returns the favor when she begins the construction to restore—and improve—the foundry, even though he tells her he doesn’t think Oliver will be coming back to it.

(She says she’s not giving up yet. He just smirks and says she means she’s not ready to take “no” for an answer. She wipes the smile off his face by telling him that if Oliver won’t be using it, _she_ will anyways, and Digg is welcome to join her.

As if he’d let her run it alone. Oliver can come back or not, this isn’t Queen’s operation anymore. And if he does come back, there’s going to be an interesting time ahead until the kid realizes that.)

He helps when Felicity uncovers a plot for a shooter to hit a QC employee confidence rally.

He helps when they get the son of a bitch—and he almost loses Felicity in the process. She comes out unscathed, but it’s a closer call than John was expecting, or okay with.

He helps when Felicity decides it’s time to bring Oliver back. Helps track him down, through overseas contacts he’s maintained. Helps put together the plan to reach Lian Yu.

Because Felicity’s right. It’s time Oliver came back and faced the people he gave up on. His sister is running his club—and running in place. Oliver’s mother is in jail, trial pending.

And Diggle doesn’t say it to Felicity, but he’s not holding out hope that Oliver will take up the bow again. But he’s got to try. And if they can get Oliver back to Starling, John knows it’s only a matter of time before Oliver realizes that Felicity is ready to keep going with or without him. And if nothing else calls him to put the hood back on, that had better.

Because John’ll be damned if he’s losing Felicity that easy, and Oliver made a promise to protect her. Diggle might as well give him the chance to remember to keep it. To make a better promise to be her partner.

They are, after all, all they’ve got.


End file.
